The Trump Administration’s Messy State Capture of Voice of America

The next session at the ICA 2024 conference is on democratic backsliding, and begins with Kate Wright; her focus is on state-led democratic backsliding and its relationship with the political capture of public service media organisations. This is difficult to study due to the problems with gaining access to such media organisations, especially as the political capture is taking place; at best, we might review this after the fact through interviews with journalists.

The present study is in the unusual position of having been able to study the state capture of the Voice of America by the Trump administration both through such interviews and a trove of internal documents and messages that were released through Freedom of Information requests.

VOA is the oldest and largest US-funded international media network, embedded in the notionally independent US Agency for Global Media and with legally enshrined editorial independence, with content generated in 48 languages and ain international audience of 326 million. It is notionally barred from targetting US audiences, but there is no explicit procedure to prevent this; insiders believe that it could be turned into a domestic state propaganda outlet within mere weeks.

During the Obama administration, governance of VOA was transferred from a board to a single individual, and this became an issue during the Trump administration. There is no evidence to date that there was any deliberate strategy to take over VOA for the administration’s purposes, but there are certainly signs of a more ‘messy’ capture of VOA, both proactively and in response to challenges to its content from a variety of right-wing media and activists in the US, and through journalistic self-censorship. Journalists were constantly criticised by right-wing actors, and someone inside the organisation also leaked highly private internal emails to critical right-wing outsiders.

This overall process, then, connects changes in causal mechanisms with changes in position-practice systems, and led to changes in journalistic agency within VOA. Journalists became anxious, overworked, exhausted, and worried about internal and external surveillance of their activities; journalists with strong established profiles felt able to resist this to some extent, but those with more precarious jobs and visa arrangements did not. Some complied by editorial intervention by the VOA leadership; some engaged in anticipatory compliance; and some of this resulted in further cycles of politicisation and the watering-down of critical journalistic content.

Domestic media discourse about Voice of America was critically important here; amongst other things, it connected the VOA with alleged conspiracies between liberal media, political activists, and the ‘deep state’. This also began to undermine the notional independence of the agency that VOA belongs to, resulting in expanding executive influence on state agencies, or ‘executive aggrandisement’. The lessons that pro-Trump actors learnt from the experience of that administration are now also explicitly (and publicly) being spelt out in the strategies formulated for a possible second Trump administration following the 2024 US election.